People For the American Way

Rhetoric on ISIS Shows the Right Wing Is Out of Touch with Reality

It’s not hard to understand that the Right Wing is out of touch, but sometimes it is hard to recognize just how out of touch its leaders really are.

Take, for instance, ISIS, the group of radical militants committing atrocities across Iraq and Syria, recently beheading two American journalists among many others. It’s a scary organization, but to the Right, it’s not as scary as, say, comprehensive immigration reform.

Nor is immigration the only domestic issue the Right thinks bears a resemblance to a vicious foreign threat.

Vic Eliason and Mat Staver last week linked same-sex marriage in the U.S. to the beheadings by ISIS. According to Eliason and Staver, gay rights advocates are destroying morality and biblical values and creating an anything-goes society where people do whatever they need to—killing or beheading—to get what they want, just like ISIS.

What’s terrifying about these comments isn’t that they’re extreme, but that these right wing figures aren’t speaking in a vacuum. Their audience continues to represent an important part of the GOP base, and in some cases these speakers have a direct line to Republican politicians.

As progressives, we can’t ignore this extremism just because it seems disconnected from reality. For the far right, that’s never been an obstacle at all.